Work Text:
Light really wasn’t anything like a Shinigami, Ryuk thought. He would make a worthy Shinigami, which was perhaps why he wouldn’t fit as one.
He really was quite human. A very short time ago, that would have been an insult, from Ryuk. But what Ryuk meant by it was merely that Light was mortal -- burningly, passionately, wonderingly alive. And Ryuk thought that he could taste for a moment what it might be like to be human. What it might be like for time to make a difference.
Time, such a human concept. Eons stretching before Ryuk and stretching after him, humans always scurrying about like rats. It always seemed so foolish.
Amusing, but foolish.
Don’t they know that they were effectively indistinguishable from the humans of a few centuries prior? Humans were always scurrying about and Ryuk was always watching, or not watching as it suited him, the past indistinguishable from the future except for the chalky dust building up in the back of his throat, the only way he knew time was passing at all. Biting into a Shinigami apple every couple hundred years, because he forgot how dry they were, or maybe, at this point, it was just habit.
He’d spit out the bite immediately, but the taste of sand caught in the back of his throat, and it never really went away after that. The sands of time building up in the back of his throat, fine layer after fine layer.
But it took thousands of years for such a small difference to be made. A single human didn’t make any difference in the history of the world. Certainly not a notable difference, not in Ryuk’s eyes. They were all the same. Entertaining at best.
Ryuk thought, now, that he might be able to understand the significance of time as containing potential. It came from the query, ‘What’s going to happen next?’ For humans, the future contained potential to thrill, to electrify and exhilarate. To disappoint. That was where excitement came from; anticipation.
Light Yagami fascinated Ryuk. But the intrigue didn’t come from who Light was, or his achievements. The intrigue came from the story that Light was telling, this story of salvation told by a boy with an easy grin and cold, determined eyes. Starry eyes and gruesome words telling of a rotten world and what could be salvaged from it.
Light Yagami saw the world in the exact same way that Ryuk did. A world that was rotten at its core. Ryuk told him that those who used the Death Note could never go to Heaven nor Hell, and Light merely tilted his head and looked at Ryuk with guileless eyes, and asked, stated, really -- “Oh, well that tells me everything I need to know. That just means there is no Heaven or Hell.”
And Ryuk didn’t get it, really. He didn’t get how Light could be this invested when he knew how it was going to end, because it was always going to end that way. In nothingness. One day, all of this was going to be ground down to dust, and then even that dust would be blown away. How could Light be invested, knowing how pointless it all was? ‘From dust we came, and to dust we shall return,’ but there was nothing beautiful in that, nor anything cruel. Merely dust. Nothing. Nothingness.
Ryuk told Light about the Shinigami world, once or twice. He’d expected that Light would be more interested, actually, with his brilliant mind and curious eyes. Ryuk had been complaining, he hadn’t thought it actually meant anything.
It hadn’t meant anything to him.
Complaining about the other Shinigami, how they spent their time just playing cards, gambling away their few worthless possessions only to gain them back a century later. It could hardly be called gambling when they knew how it was going to end. How, sometimes, they’d crumble into dust while dealing out a hand, having forgotten to write names -- how ironic, huh? A god of death dying because they’d been too lazy to keep killing humans.
The world was rotten because it was callous, uncaring, and unchanging. Nothing made a difference to the world. And Ryuk had found that irony could often be found in that callousness, and seeing that irony had always amused him. It was ironic to try to find, or determine, or create any sort of meaning in such a callous world because such a world will always defy the attempt.
Ironic, the roofs of churches collapsing on ardent believes.
Ironic, how Ryuk knew Light was going to die. Light was going to die screaming. Ryuk didn’t expect anything less of him; Light was going to be dragged into nothingness while kicking and screaming and clawing at the floor and writhing in death’s grasp, and it was not going to be enough and he was going to know that and he was still going to try.
He was going to kick and scream and claw and writhe, and then, he was going to beg. He was going to put on his nicest, sweetest, most guileless expression and cajole Ryuk into letting him live, and then he was going to extort him, then threaten him, and then curse him and damn his name.
Ironic, how Light could preach so ardently about salvation, about optimism, when it would yield him nothing. He was going to die just the same as any other human, desperate and pathetic and mortal. He was going to die pathetically and his stories about salvation would not help him then.
Ironic, how Light might have made a notable difference in Ryuk’s eyes after all, a difference in the way Ryuk saw the world. Ryuk was still going to kill him, of course. And he wouldn’t regret it. He was only going to kill Light when there was nothing left for him, anyway. It would be a favor to him. If any human deserved to go out kicking and screaming, it would be Light. Light didn’t deserve to go out quietly in a prison cell, he deserved to scream as he died. He deserved to have a name to curse aside from his own, because Light was not his own damnation, Light was his own salvation.
Ironic, how this world damned Light by creating him, creating such an clever, cunning, creative human in a world where no invention of his would ever manage to change the way things were, a world where humans were damned.
And Light, in turn, created a story. He created a story of something salvaged. A story of something valuable found in a pile of junk, lifted and held gingerly in grimy hands. His new world. Crime statistics falling, such a theoretical concept, but it wasn’t theoretical to Light. To him, it was something real, something valuable. Of course, this new world was grimy, just as were the hands which held it, because that was where it came from, a heap of trash. But for Light, the point wasn’t the grime. The point was the value he saw in it despite.
Ryuk told Light about the Shinigami world, and Light asked, bright and guileless, that if Ryuk’s world was rotten, then why wouldn’t he try to change it for the better? Because that was how Light was, he tried to change things. Even when the odds were overwhelmingly against him, and he knew it, because he was far too intelligent to delude himself otherwise, he still fought against them tooth and nail. Because to him, that made a difference. It made a difference to have given it his all.
Ryuk thought to himself, that after he killed Light, and went back to the Shinigami world, he would tell this story. It wouldn’t be a story about irony. It wouldn’t be a story about the boy who died begging and cursing Ryuk’s name, nor a story about the Shinigami who felt a sense of loss as the boy drew his last breath.
It would be a story about a meaningless world and the worth that could be found in its existence nonetheless. A world that was callous and a boy who tried to make a difference in it nonetheless, because the attempt meant something to him. To him, it meant something, that image of his new world, even when such could only ever be a concept. Even when this determination to create it at all was likely foolish, when Light was intelligent and curious and optimistic and anyone else would say that his potential was squandered by his attachment to his ideals. Condemned by history.
But Ryuk knew, history was a meaningless concept. Light was a mortal. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, damned to Mu; nothingness.
And for a moment, Ryuk thought he might be able to taste what it would be like to be mortal. The thrill of it. Because Light wasn’t dead, yet. He would die, and he knew this, and Ryuk knew this, and Ryuk was still thrilled by watching him. Invested. Because that, is what is gotten out of living in a pointless world; the thrill of being alive.
Ryuk stayed in Light’s room that night, sitting on his window ledge, watching him sleep. Memories flitted across his mind, blurred together, and then they settled back into the recesses of his psyche, and he just watched the rise and fall of Light’s chest, listened to his breath. Such a delicate organism, the human body, so fragile, so easy to kill.
Ryuk didn’t know how things were going to play out. But if he knew one thing, he knew that it was going to be glorious.